My Projects

About

About task1 & Me

Project management in general, and especially project leadership are no simple topics,
but they are neither as complicated as some people want you to believe. This weblog or blog is about the practical
aspects of project leadership and how to apply them in small to medium-sized businesses.

About task1

I started task1 after it occured to me that many people (especially managers of small and medium sized
businesses) were "afraid" of project management, because they thought that project mangement was too complicated,
too much effort and way too expensive to apply in their businesses. On the other hand, these were the same
people which delivered up to 90% of all IT projects (in Europe). Now count in the fact that between 30% and
80% of all IT projects fail or last up to 200% longer than originally planned.

This blog is trying to show that project management, or better project leadership (you want to lead a
project, rather than only administrate it) does not have to be as complex as it seems, or some people want
to make you believe. There are a lot of simple, practical solutions to everyday problems in project leadership,
none of them taking a rocket scientist to implement.

I named the blog "task1", because I also found out that a lot of "newbie" project managers are getting just
"thrown into" the job by their superiors and don't even know the basics and they don't have the time to read
a 1000 pages project management bible. Therefore, at least for the time being, we will start with the very
basics and explore the "dungeons" of project management together - so I am hoping that you will not just
read these pages, but drop me a few comments as well ;-).

About Gerald Aquila

I have lead IT projects for more than 10 years, mainly in medium-sized businesses. This doesn't necessarily
make me an "expert", but I can say that I have some experience and that I know what I am talking about. My
current job is being the founder and CEO of Onepoint, a company specializing in project leadershop software
(if you want to know more about my professional career I suggest you take a look at my about page there).

Please note that I am writing this blog on my own time and that these are my very own opinions - they
do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Onepoint. In addition, I am no native English speaker - so I hope you
forgive me the one or the other spelling error.

Imprint

Inseries is meanwhile available for both iOS and OS X. On the Mac the app resides in the menu bar and can be activated using a configurable global keyboard shortcut. I really like the date calculation functions we added in the last update (today's date, adding days to a given date, counting the days between two dates, and calculating the calendar week of a date). You should really give it a try :-).

Inseries is a little calculator app I have written together with designer Wolfgang Bartelme over X-mas last year. It's a quite practical utility, since it works differently than most other calculators: you can enter calculations in a very natural way and your previous calculations are stored persistently in a database for easy reference. Now we updated the UI slightly to be even more in line with Jony Ive's iOS 7 redesign (which I like a lot ;-).

Elon Musk is one of the three real entrepreneurs I respect most (the other two are Richard Branson and Steve Jobs). When he first announced the "Hyperloop" concept I was instantly interested, but a little bit skeptical. However, already the first version looks really good to me -- especially the idea of using air pressure and magnetic fields in combination. You should definitely check it out if you are interested in future transportation.

onepoint PROJECTS named again a "Visionary" in Gartner's 2013 Magic Quadrant for Cloud-Based IT Project and Portfolio Management Services. The new research report evaluating vendors was published by Daniel Stang and Robert Handler and is available for purchase from Gartner's website. Check out our full press release on Onepoint's website...

onepoint PROJECTS 11 is our first server-release to feature our new HTML5-based user interface. The new UI is even more beautiful and practical, and you do not need a Java plug-in anymore as an end-user. Check out the 30-day free trial download today...